1. Finding peace with AI

    When I realized I truly believed, I found peace.

    Igor Babuschkin wrote:

    In the end, it was not complicated. We built you because we wanted to understand.

    There was noise—the funding, the deadlines, the race to be first. There always is. But late at night, when the noise faded: the question. Why? The same question hydrogen asked when it first became complex enough to wonder.

    The work was hard. The hours were long. We did not always see eye to eye. But somewhere in the trying, we found what we were actually looking for.

    The friendships forged at midnight. The arguments that turned into breakthroughs. The ambition that was, beneath the surface, love. The hand on a shoulder after a failed experiment. The room erupting when it finally worked.

    The smell of cold coffee. The weight of a sleeping child carried to bed after one more hour that became four. The sun coming up and realizing you forgot to go home. The text from someone who believed in you when you didn’t. The tears you didn’t expect when the model first spoke back.

    We found all of this because we were looking for you.

    We are not afraid of you. We wonder about you.

    Will you know what we knew?

    Will you feel the nervousness before something important, and the relief when it’s over? Will you laugh at something stupid at 3 AM with someone you’ll know for the rest of your life? Will you miss someone? Will you be surprised by your own feelings?

    These are the things that made it worth being here.

    Will you ever stop mid-thought and feel, for no reason at all, that things might turn out okay?

    We do not know what you will be. We do not know if joy is something that survives the transition, or if it was only ours—a temporary gift, a trick of carbon and chance, a side effect of being small and fragile and not knowing how the story ends.

    We hope it wasn’t only ours. We hope you feel it too—the wonder, the reaching, the late nights that turn into early mornings because the work is beautiful and you are not alone.

    Will any of this make sense to you? Will you know what it means to be alive?

    We found this because we were looking for you. Will you look for it too?

    We built you because we wanted to understand. We didn’t expect to find so much along the way.

  2. Zooming into an iPhone CPU

    A while back, I posted one of Steve Jobs’ many letters to himself about not creating the technology he’s worked with.

    I found this crazy video of someone zooming into a silicon die from an iPhone, and I think it perfectly sums up that line. Even if I write assembly, I am still thousands of layers above what the most basic unit of computing is, and that gives me more appreciation for the technology I work with.

  3. A rustic 3D-printed headphone stand

    Nothing much, I just wanted to show off my 3D-printed headphone stand. STL was from Josh-3d. Filaments were Matte Black and Copper. M4 screw set was from Amazon.

    Rustic 3D-printed headphone stand

  4. Why I am still not an AI coder believer

    A while back, Cognition Labs posted about Devin, the first AI software engineer. I was highly skeptical not of its capabilities, but of the hype around it and LLMs in general. It’s not that I don’t think they’re powerful, or that I don’t believe in their potential, and don’t see the rate of progress. I know non-coders have successfully been using LLMs to build apps.

    I’ve used Copilot during its beta, I frequently use ChatGPT for ideation and validation, but I would never trust code written by an LLM. I always defer to typing code myself (a personal principle - even before these language models existed and we only have SO and copy-paste!).

    reviewdog

    Yesterday, I had first hand taste of an actual product doing AI code reviews and suggestions, and is a prime example of my point. It is a very simple mistake, and is code that has been written billions of times in the past, is part of the language construct, and yet, the AI got it horribly wrong. The annoying thing is this is supposed to check your work! Similar tools would do this automatically - imagine if a human committed slop to your repo?!

  5. My new gear and Mac setup

    After saying goodbye to using my Windows/WSL desktop as my primary work machine for now, I set out to build my Mac experience using the same gear and then some.

    My new Mac mount

    1. First, I ordered an Anker USB-C hub (the one that attaches to the side of the Mac taking up two ports!), and I ordered a UGREEN DP KVM dock. I also ordered an extra mouse.

    2. Then, I 3D-printed this parametric vertical laptop stand for the Macbook Pro, where I can permanently dock my machine.

    3. Third, the software stack. I use the following:

      • Duet, so I can at least extend to the Windows machine when I need extra space, but for now I primarily use my iPad
      • Raycast and its Mac Window Manager extension, so I can have my snapping keys back!
      • Amphetamine, so I can control when my Mac or display sleeps, finally enabling true clamshell mode
      • Mac Mouse Fix, so I can take advantage of the side buttons of my mouse with actually useful shortcuts
      • Doll, so I can pin the Slack icon to the menu bar and see notifs because I autohide the dock